How to Learn Patience Like A Sports Fan

Sports fans will wait their entire life for a championship win without ever quitting on their team while twenty-three percent of people quit on their goal after 1 week.

The average goal lasts just 3.74 months, with only 6% to 9% of people actually keeping their resolutions for an entire year.

One baseball fan, Mabel Ball, waited 108 years to see another Cubs championship and, sadly, passed days after the team finally won the World Series again in 2016.

I am a diehard Knicks fan. I just felt the ultimate nirvana: winning a championship at 50 years old after rooting for a team for 41 years. Never giving up, and always supporting, is the ultimate deliciousness.

I’ve learned a lot about patience through sports — through the Knicks, through the Jets, through business and life. This article is about those lessons and breaking down patience.

Before going further, some definitions matter, because when I talk about patience, some people hear the wrong thing.

• Patience is the the ability to accept obstacles or delays in a calm and self-possessed way. The ability to act with calm or restraint under provocation or strain And the ability to persevere over a long period of time despite opposition, difficulty, or adversity.

• Urgency is a pressing situation or matter of critical importance that demands immediate attention and speedy action.

• Complacency is a feeling of uncritical satisfaction with oneself, one’s achievements, or one’s current situation.

• Laziness is the quality of being unwilling to work, act, or exert effort despite having the physical and mental capacity to do so

• Unproductive is an adjective describing something or someone that fails to yield a useful result, generates insufficient value, or lacks progress.

When people see my content about “you’re 50, you’ve got time,” a small subset want to weaponize it — they think I’m talking about complacency, laziness, or lack of ambition. I’m not. I’m the most ambitious, most active, highest-productivity person I know. This is about patience as a macro relationship, not an excuse to slow down day to day.

Not patience instead of urgency. Patience and urgency at the same time. That’s the whole game.

I told a young entrepreneur once: “You need to be patient. You’re 22, 23 years old — what do you think is going to happen overnight? You need to be fast…every day. But in the big picture, nothing good is going to happen for the next six years.”

That sounds contradictory only if you think patience means doing nothing. It doesn’t.

Patience is what lets you work fast every day without demanding the scoreboard validate you every night.

The Knicks won the 2026 NBA Finals, beating the Spurs 4-1 for their first championship since 1973 — a 53-year wait. Millions of fans celebrated. But there were two very different versions of that celebration: the people who jumped on board in the last six months, and the ones who went through the pain.

For the ones who went through the pain, the champagne was more delicious.

This isn’t unique to the Knicks.

• The Boston Red Sox waited 86 years between World Series titles before winning in 2004.

• The Chicago Cubs waited 108 years before their 2016 championship.

• The New York Jets last won a Super Bowl in January 1969 — I’m now 50 years old and I’ve been rooting for a football team that is my true number one. The Knicks are my number two, and I’m still waiting for the Jets.
  

  And I have learned a lot about patience through the Jets and the Knicks.

Sports fans understand something: you can care a lot and still wait. You can be emotional, loud, loyal, hurt, excited, disappointed, hopeful — and still come back next season.

That kind of patience shows up in ways that go far beyond a parade. When the Chicago Cubs finally broke their 108-year championship drought in 2016, a fan named Wayne Williams drove roughly 600 miles from North Carolina to a cemetery in Indiana, where his father was buried. Years earlier, the two had made a pact: whenever the Cubs reached the World Series, they’d listen together. His father died before that day came. So Williams sat at the grave, turned on the radio, and listened to the Cubs win it all and got to tell his father, “We did it.”

That’s what patience looks like when you refuse to let time erase a commitment.

By 34, I had built my dad’s liquor store into a $60 million+ business, and I never made more than $150,000 a year doing it. I was 34 before I ever made a single piece of business content for the internet. VaynerMedia started in the conference room of another company because I had no money, with four of my brother AJ’s friends working with us for free.

No matter how fast or hard you work, success doesn’t happen overnight. It might happen in seven years — which is incredibly fast by most standards — but not overnight. Every “overnight sensation” you know of put in years of effort nobody talks about.

Even the companies that get held up as instant hits usually weren’t. Facebook didn’t cross 100 million users until roughly four and a half years after Zuckerberg launched it from a dorm room.

Most of what looks like a rocket ship took the slow, unglamorous route to get there.

Remember this: the bigger the ambition, the slower you need to go. If you want a small thing, chase a short timeline. If you want to build something meaningful, build a different relationship with time.

In early 2006, I started Wine Library TV. For 18 months, I did the show five days a week and nobody gave a shit. I had 30 to 75 views on every video for an entire year.

Today, I get 50 DMs a day from entrepreneurs telling me, “I’ve been doing this and it’s not working. Should I give up?” I ask how long they’ve been at it. The answer is usually three or four months. My response: “You want this to be your life’s work, and you’re giving up after four months? Are you out of your mind?”

Wine Library TV didn’t take off until mid-2007 — a year and a half of five-days-a-week effort, getting a couple hundred views at a time. You’ve got to keep putting in the work. One is better than zero.

Patience doesn’t remove the work. Patience protects the work from your insecurity. It keeps you from quitting in month four because results don’t match the fantasy in your head. It keeps you from comparing your first season to somebody else’s championship parade.

People don’t understand they have time. When you’re 16, 20, 25, or 29, you have enormous opportunity for high risk.

I was in a liquor store at 29. At 31. At 33. I was a wine merchant in New Jersey, buying and selling wine every single day. That was my life. Years later, my life looks completely different. I’m consistently surprised by people’s inability to grasp how long the game actually is.

Patience doesn’t come at the expense of ambition. You can grind and stay patient for 10 years and still be nine years younger than me. That’s how much time is on your side.

According to a working paper from MIT Sloan, the average age of entrepreneurs who’ve started companies and gone on to hire at least one employee is 42 years old.

“Time’s everything, so use it” is a very different sentence than “relax and do nothing.” Using it means: build, learn, taste, try, post, sell, call, study. Make the content. Take the meeting. Run the experiment. But stop demanding your life look like somebody else’s highlight reel by Tuesday.

Give yourself grace. There’s no “figuring it out” — there’s just enjoyment of the process. Don’t be lazy. Don’t be complacent. Be patient and thoughtful.

Some sports fans never see their team win in their lifetime. But never giving up and always supporting is the point.

You may not have experience yet, but you have time. That means positioning yourself to learn and leverage now, not to cash in. You don’t need the money yet. You don’t need the fame yet. Build the foundational pieces that make you successful later. Enjoy the process, not just the trophies.

A final reminder:

Macro patience. Micro speed.

Patience is not laziness. It’s not complacency. It’s not a lack of ambition. It’s patience and urgency at the same time — showing up every day like the game matters, while understanding the season is long.

And for the ones who go through the pain: the champagne is always more delicious.